Fugu Talk

The HyperBowl Classic lane is now available as a Mac widget, and it’s the Featured Widget on the Apple Download site!

I just discovered that Hulu links to the  South Park Studios site for all the South Park episodes. I’m not really a South Park fan, but the World of Warcraft episode is a must-see (reportedly, Blizzard helped out with the CG segments)

About the only thing you can control on the App Store to promote your apps, besides clever wording, is the frequency of releases. You can adjust the displayed released date of your app one per release (it doesn’t happen automatically) and then customers browsing the recent releases can actually find it. My app release and upgrade dates are easily discerned from the spikes on this graph:

Apple recommends two week intervals for major bug-fix releases and monthly for feature updates. Hey, it’s agile development!

Boardspace is an interesting board-game site, complete with browser-based play, a multiplayer lobby and chat, bots, and board games I’ve never heard of (but which might be good candidates for iPhone deployment). For example, one of the games is Knockabout:

Finally, I got the last remaining app updated to iPhone OS 3.0, WordsEye Feature. And by update, I mean, not crashing.

This update does have new functionality – now it displays the scene title and author, which should be gratifying at least to the author (I certainly enjoy seeing my own name on these things)

The Mac widget is also updated. Like most of my other apps, this started out as a this-could-be-neat idea for a widget, but unlike the other apps, I released it for the iPhone first and it had more of a start-and-stop history:

1. Thought a Mac widget that retrieves and displays the “featured” scenes from the WordsEye server in a slideshow manner would look cool.
2. Talked it over with my friends at Semantic Light, who run the WordsEye site, to make sure they’re OK with it.
3. Gave it a try, started turning into a lot of work, decided it wasn’t a high priority since I wasn’t going to charge for it, and the built-in audience for WordsEye isn’t huge (but who knows, maybe it’ll attract new WordsEye users)
4. A year later, after starting iPhone app development, thought, hey, that WordsEye viewer would look cool on the iPhone screen (the images almost match the screen size)
5. Went back to the code, got it working, tried it on the iPhone, and sitting on the couch flipping through the images while watching bad TV, thought, hey, this does look cool.
6. A few months later, finally got around to that original widget.

The sharp-eyed WordsEye user might notice that the images in this latest iPhone release are cropped on the top and right sides. The original WordsEye images are slightly larger than the iPhone screen – the previous version scaled the images to fit, but the new image-downloading code in this version apparently has a bug that prevents it (not evident in the widget). The scaling does change the aspect ratio slightly, so one could argue that cropping is better (or perhaps scaling to fit the screen and then adding a border to maintain the aspect ratio, like on wide TV screens, but that just wastes the limited display area of the iPhone screen). I think the scaling looks better, but rather than add some special-case workaround code this time around, I’ll just wait for the next Unity engine update.

I tried out the App Store promo code feature, where you can request a limited number of promo codes for each app release to distribute for, well, promotional purposes. And I’ve got to say, it’s a hassle. One review site sent me email requesting one or more codes, but with the disclaimer that they may or may not bother to review the app. Nice racket. On another site, after I responded to a post, a forum member sent me a private message requesting a code, so I decided to be democratic about it and posted a set on the forum. It’s like watching college students or starving artists – once they see a freebie, they want one too. After the initial set ran out, one guy said he couldn’t try out the app because the all the promo codes were taken. He “couldn’t” pay $.99? I can understand that he “wouldn’t” pay, considering he posted several times and took every opportunity to trash all of my other work, which seemed oddly aggressive and off-topic to me (I’ve got to wonder if he was a former co-worker), but really, if he was so certain that he wouldn’t like the app, why take a promo code from someone who might actually appreciate it? I posted my remaining codes, and was rewarded with a review, true to form, that he didn’t like it, but it wasn’t as crappy as my other work. Gee, thanks. You must be great at dinner parties.

But that’s the Internet for you – it’s the ultimate gathering place for personality disorders (instead of that weird “I am a PC campaign, Microsoft should just showcase the semi-literate reviews on the App Store. So much for the “creative class”), but there is good with the bad – I got some reviews with constructive suggestions, and I see that promo codes are a useful tool for jump-starting reviews and downloads of a new app. After all, I do grab those iTunes coupons every time I visit Starbucks. It looks like the trend these days however is to deploy a “lite” version of an app to drive users to the paid version. I tried a variation for FuguMaze, probably with less long-term effectiveness, by releasing it free initially, and after seeing 20,000 downloads in the first week, moving it up to $.99. The sales dropped sharply, but by then, it had plenty of reviews.

So here are the remaning FuguMaze promo codes for the latest release, good for another three weeks or so. First come, first served!

RXMEN63FNYLR
KEKYYYKPTREL
F6WTA6NFY3JF
ERMHRE739KTP
NTKN6YXF7K7J
X6KKHPNP7EX3
9H34XJKE7NRE
YER3P73LKK4R
RE993FLRMT66
WF7N9WP7W63K
XLMPNY4WRFL4
WKNJWKHJW3L9
TW736JWWR96Y
7M6EAXEM6XN6
66FAKH69MFJX
3YKJ94YK97MN
H64XFA9KHW73
TEHFMAN9367E
WXKPMXMPALRP
RNJ44X7EKLK7
PEXYP3937999
6X94RJNJMX3Y
NNTMPYP63FPF
ELEYNKAF3LKX
6JRKHE4TEYW6
66XEELKL9JTY
Y9MHTTJJ7KM6
HY93RYT7TF4W
LKJLTP6H6YKE
TXWEAH4M4PX3
NNYRXYFJY9J4
E93FPKFKKPPN
JLAWN7NKXAKT
NXA97EFPJ4XK
WNKMFJW6NMWT
WK7YK3P769W9
KL6MLP3KPHMF
YX949E4EAKRF
94LX7TW3NLMY
K77LKMAYP7AF

Zombies seem to be all the rage these days, and that includes the App Store. The first iPhone game I really enjoyed is called, well, Zombie. The controls are as simple as you can get – just tap on the screen in the direction you want to shoot. It’s the iPhone equivalent of button mashing (screen mashing?)

The best-selling Unity-based iPhone game apparently is Zombieville. I cheaped out and tried Zombieville Lite:

Somewhat more involved controls (enough so that you do have to read the help), but still pretty simple, and overall simple gameplay, plus nice art and sound. Brainless (get it?) fun!

FuguTilt was the first Mac widget I listed on the Apple download site, and now with version 1.5 (the download page says 1.4 because I forgot to update that field), it’s got a mention as a Staff Pick (which usually provides a big spike in downloads). Just goes to show, if you keep plugging away at it, someone will show some appreciation!

After a nine-month gestation (more on that later),  and a two-week approval period, HyperBowl (at least the Classic lane) is finally on the App Store!

An Apple ad moment occurred during dim sum this weekend – everyone pulled out their mobile devices, mostly iPhones (including my iPod touch) with a couple of Blackberries in the mix, and started comparing apps. The favorite was Pocket God.

It’s interesting that everyone wasn’t so much playing a game as just playing. No bragging about high scores – just showing each other how to create lightning, start a tidal wave…OK, it sounds cruel, but really, this thing is exploratory fun. You can drag just about anything – change the time of day by dragging the sun, incinerate something by pulling the magnifying glass over it, levitate or launch the pygmies (toward the volcano)…and none of this Game Over buzzkill, just drop more pygmies, birds, sharks to keep things going. For $.99 on the App Store, it’s a deal.